NDOT Teammates Recognized for Right of Way Process Improvements

Tom Weber, Right of Way Chief Negotiator, and Karla Smith, Right of Way Project Manager, received the Mountain Mover Award/Admiralship for making significant improvements to the process. With their leadership, deeds will be recorded in less than half the time, and work to improve or expand highway infrastructure can begin sooner.

Prior to improvements, the process was paperheavy, involved printing/copying, assembling paper forms and packets with wet signatures, and mailing via certified mail to the county offices. Once accepted by the county, NDOT was billed the recording fee and payment was required before the deed could be recorded. This took 67 steps, occasional rework when a deed was rejected, averaging 23 days.

Most of the process was moved to digital, eliminating printing, and completed with digital signatures. It was also discovered that nearly every county in Nebraska utilizes a cloud-based platform to receive and approve or reject deeds. This platform also calculates and submits the recording fees upfront, eliminating the external billing and payment process that adds additional time to the process. Nebraska counties under this platform average 24 hours to record deeds. Other solutions were also implemented to reduce the number of handoffs, provide additional training and cross training of staff, and focus on reduction of errors that lead to rejections and rework.

Happy Customers

“The system not only reduces process time on the state’s side; it also reduces the process time on the county’s side,” Smith said. “Our customers are also happy.”

“In addition, this process improvement created a positive ripple effect as the staff member who previously devoted time to processing recordings is now re-focusing that time to scan old paper documents to our digital archive,” Smith said. “This in turn allows other staff to access those old records directly resulting in additional time savings for NDOT staff.”

“Rachel Kilcoin, the process improvement coordinator for this project, really showed the merits of having the P.I. team available,” Weber said. “She kept us organized, on task, and motivated to see it through to completion.”

Smith concurred. “With any change in process, a few barriers arise. Rachel broke down those barriers. Our staff would never have had the time or patience to work through those obstacles without her.”

The COE Summit convenes leaders, change agents, and decision-makers from across the state to discuss the opportunities to build on successes with the COE. It provides a unique chance for leaders who share a passion for continuous improvement to get together in the same room to exchange ideas. 